Employment Based Immigration blog

Apr 10thH-1B Visa Cap Update – Lottery Completed!

On April 7 USCIS announced that it had received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to reach the statutory cap of 65,000 visas for fiscal year 2015 and that it received more than the limit of 20,000 H-1B petitions filed under the advanced degree exemption. In total USCIS received about 172,500 H-1b petitions. On April 10, 2014, USCIS completed the lottery to select enough petitions to meet the 65,000 general-category cap and 20,000 cap for the Master’s degree exemption. For cap-subject petitions not randomly selected, USCIS will reject and return the petition with filing fees. It is likely that it will take several weeks to find out whether a petition was selected in the lottery. By Moona Shakil Ali